As I Like To Pontificate
In today's Intro we'll eventually get round to discussing manglement, malicious compliance, greed and stupidity all rolled into a single package BUT before we do that Conrad is going to level the playing field thanks to a pet peeve he has. Art!
"Planned and scheduled maintenance" taking place
In most media coverage this kind of 'Panic buying' causes what they call 'Gas shortages', when they mean 'GASOLINE shortages', which is just editors and sub-editors being lazy.
Conrad prefers to call it what it is - petrol. No confusing abbreviations of South Canadianisms here.
Except we all know Conrad by now. Unable to resist digging in order to unearth the truth. Art!
AI Art Generator comes good
'Petrol', you see, is a derivation of 'Petroleum', which in turn is from the Latin <spit hack> 'Petra-' meaning 'Stone' (hence today's title) and 'Oleum' meaning 'Oil'.
'Gasoline', it turns out, is actually of British origin circa 1860, from 'Gas' meaning 'Gas' - stop me if I get too technical - 'Ol' from our old friend 'Oleum' and '-Ine' because that's how they suffixed a lot of chemical names in mid-nineteenth century. How it got subsumed into South Canada and British America I don't know and am not going to investigate because I'm getting on in years.
ANYWAY back to the Intro, and a sad and sorry yet satisfying saga of serendipitous stupidity. Our narrator, Engineer Narrator Gloatinlgy, hereafter ENG, was a junior engineer working at a gas plant being constructed in South Canada, and here Conrad believes he actually meant 'Gas' as a vapour under pressure, as we shall see later. Art!
ENG was responsible for quality control over materials and piping supplied to the plant, ensuring that nothing sub-standard was used to prevent any kind of catastrophic failure when the plant went on-line. He inadvertently said that there were very strict deadlines in place and everyone was under pressure. Art!
Sorry, couldn't resist
Then arrived the fateful shipment of piping, which was intended to carry gas in vapour form under high pressure, yet ENG did not like the look of it, very wisely so. First of all, the mill markings - a form of identification stamped into the metalwork itself - did not tally with the supplied material certificates, which are themselves quality control documents used for critical components. Getting suspicious, ENG looked closer and noticed welding that was rough and unprofessional in appearance. Art!
To quote ENG, 'When we looked closer we found surface defects and laminations at the bevel', the 'bevel' being where sections of pipe are chamfered to create a better fit, rather than being a perfectly flush surface. Although only a junior engineer on this project, ENG recognised poor quality steel products from a dubious steel mill. He and the Senior Engineer both went to the Project Manager, expecting him to reject the dud piping and order in replacements from an approved supplier.
Nope. Conrad wonders if the Project Mangler had been the one who ordered the faulty pipes in the first place, because they were cheaper.
'Twould seem that the PM was only PM because his uncle, a senior executive, got him as a nepo hire. PM's background was in business admin, not engineering, he knew nothing about pipes or steel quality and only cared about hitting deadlines, because that way he got a bigger fatter bonus.
Wanting to avoid a delay and with dollar signs in his eyes, he stated that the supplier had claimed their product was adequate so it was. ENG and Senior Engineer were canny enough to carry out this communication via e-mail. which comes into play later on. PM waved off any concerns by claiming that the pressure test would catch any problems. It did, spectacularly. Art!
The pipe ruptured dramatically when gas was pumped in under pressure to test it's capacity and durability. This catastrophic failure shut the whole project down for weeks, instead of the few days it would have taken to replace the faulty piping. Ooops.
All the faulty piping had to be cut out and replaced, at the contractor's expense, the supplier was blacklisted and searching questions were asked about how such substandard piping had been approved. Project Mangler promptly tried to throw ENG and others under the bus, which is where that e-mail trail came in handy. PM was immediately removed from the project and fired a little while later. ENG never saw him again and discovered PM no longer worked in engineering. Yes, one supposes having hundreds of thousands of dollars in loss on your CV doesn't look especially encouraging.
A cautionary tale of nepo hiring going very badly wrong!
Back To Bovvie
Don't worry, we're not going to be running out of any BOVINGTON TANK MUSEUM content any time this year, just to reassure you if you were at all worried about it. I like to keep you informed. Art!
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| Note the 'Pegasus' airborne symbol |
This miniature oddity is the 'Tetrarch', a tank unintentionally able to fit in the enormous Hamilcar glider. The idea was that having Hamilcars deliver Tetrarchs by airborne delivery would help beef up the airborne infantry landing alongside them. This was done only once, in the airborne operations of D-Day and for a while afterwards, before they were withdrawn from front-line service. Their problem was that they were quite puny, with thin armour and only mounting the long-obsolete 2-pounder gun. Still, if you're a Teuton soldier absent panzers of your own, you might not be quite so dismissive.
Col was not impressed with the quality of the Hamilcar's wood. Come on, it's 80 years old! Art?
The terror of the Tigers
Save From Watery Grave
There is a cautionary tale on the BBC's News webpage, about a trio of experienced cavers who had to be rescued by over 100 volunteers when Storm Amy brought the Atlantic to visit. Art!
The storm arrived a lot quicker than the cavers had planned for, and it was a lot worse than they had planned for, before you ask. The rescuers included: Upper Wharfdale Fell Rescue Association; Calder Valley Search And Rescue; Cave Rescue Organisation; Derbyshire Cave Rescue Organisation; the RAF Mountain Rescue Team and Swaledale Mouuntain Rescue Team. Quite a collection.
The trio were brought out after 42 hours underground, exhausted but uninjured. Art!
This is the rescuers diverting floodwater away from the cave entrance, which had also been dammed with stones. Thus a bad situation was prevented from getting even worse, and by 'worse' I mean people drowning.
Nope nope nope NOPE! and to think people do this for pleasure. Egad.
What's Wrong With This Picture?
Art!
Pretty Bloody Flamingo
Not the bird, in case you were picturing hordes of mutant zombie birds blocking out the sunlight as they declare war on humanity. Art
By the end of this month the Ukrainians expect to be constructing 7 of these per day. They were used in an only-partly successful strike in Crimea and not acknowledged since then, so Your Humble Scribe is wondering if they're being accumulated for a mass strike at numerous targets inside Mordorvia. Another fact released about them is that they fly at a height of only 50 metres above the ground at 600 PROUD IMPERIAL mph. Budanov must be smiling his inscrutable smile right now.
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